Meta will pay $725 million to Facebook users in the US due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal Informatics direction
In 2018, the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues to haunt Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms.
Reuters Metan said it had agreed to pay $725 million to settle a US lawsuit accusing Facebook of allowing third parties, including UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, to access the personal data of 87 million users in multiple countries, including Canada and the US. states. Targeting political ads during the 2016 Brexit referendum and the US federal election that year.
Meta said he did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement ReutersSubject to approval by a federal judge in San Francisco.
If approved, the settlement would resolve allegations by Facebook users that Facebook violated various federal and state laws by allowing the company’s software developers and business partners to collect personal data on a broad basis without their consent.
Reuters The users’ lawyers allege that Facebook tricked them into believing they could retain control over their personal information, when in fact it allowed thousands of selected outsiders to access it.
The news agency reports that Facebook has argued that it does not have a legitimate interest in protecting the information that users share with their friends on social media. But U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called that opinion “deeply flawed” and allowed the case to proceed in 2019.
In contrast, an attempt by Canadian Facebook users to file a class-action lawsuit against Facebook was dismissed by an Ontario judge earlier this year.
In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to settle a Federal Trade Commission investigation into its privacy practices and $100 million to settle claims by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it misused investor user data.
In Canada, the federal privacy commissioner sued Facebook after the social media company refused to admit it violated the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which collected information from about 622,000 Canadians.
The data came from Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan’s app, which claims to be a personality test for academic research called “This Is Your Digital Life,” given to Facebook users. Unbeknownst to the participants, the data was shared with SCL Elections and its subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. The lists of individuals based on modeling by SCL and Kogan were then submitted to BC-based AggregateIQ for placement of targeted political ads on Facebook.
Little did the quiz takers know that accessing their personal profiles also provided access to the profiles of their followers. So, for example, while only 53 people in Australia installed the This Is Your Digital Life app, it was able to collect information from about 311,127 people, according to court documents.
In February, Facebook lost a major battle with Australia’s privacy regulator over Cambridge Analytica, after the social media giant rejected claims that it did not do business in the country and did not collect personal data. The ruling allowed the privacy commissioner to pursue its lawsuit against Facebook.
You can get acquainted with the original article IT World Canadasister publication Informatics direction.
French adaptation and translation by Renaud Larue-Langlois.
